The practical content of the teaching is that the work is not transferable. A Setian is expected to define their own course of study and practice, and the Temple degree structure recognises attainment that a member has demonstrated rather than conferring a status that then produces it. Initiation on this account is something a person does, and the organisation exists to provide material, criticism and company for it.
That emphasis explains the shape of the group. It has remained deliberately small and reading-heavy, organised into orders and local pylons, with a substantial recommended bibliography and an expectation that members will write. The individualism is doctrinal rather than merely cultural: if awareness developing itself is the point of existence, then a member who defers to an authority has stopped doing the thing.
The Temple was founded in 1975 by members who left the Church of Satan, and the difference between the two bodies is instructive. The Church of Satan, under Anton LaVey, treated Satan as a symbol of human nature and its rituals as psychodrama. The Temple of Set holds that Set is a genuinely existing intelligence, distinct from the natural order, and that the isolate consciousness of a human being is likewise something the universe did not produce by itself. Xeper is what that consciousness does with itself, and the Temple presents it as the reason the Temple exists at all.